The Things They Left Behind by Peggy Burds, owner of Emerald Estate Sales, First Personal Singular Column in Washington Post Magazine (10-17-10). She concludes: "Everything I own has a story: It may not have started out as my story, but when I chose to bring it into my life, it became part of it. We all write our own history, and our stuff is often the only thing left to tell that story. I don't want my story to be a bunch of junk that doesn't mean anything."

Partially sighted readers who want to listen to a title in audio should contact the National Library Service (NLS), which is part of the Library of Congress, or their state Library for the Blind.
"Frank identifies three basic narratives of illness....Restitution narratives anticipate getting well again and give prominence to the technology of cure. In chaos narratives, illness seems to stretch on forever, with no respite or redeeming insights. Quest narratives are about finding that insight as illness is transformed into a means for the ill person to become someone new."~from Amazon review of The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics by Arthur W. Frank.

"It's four little words. Tell me a story. And that's all we do....Even the people who wrote the Bible were smart enough to know, tell them a story. The issue was evil in the world. The story was Noah. Now, the Bible knew that."
~ Don Hewitt, creator of television's 60 Minutes, in a documentary on his career

The Self We Tell Ourselves We Are Influences Our Decisions

"I have learned from autobiography that humans are adaptable and it is quite likely that more attention will be given to integration of information from the viewpoints of science, society, and individuals. Autobiography represents a 'soft area' for research, one that would not have been very respected in past years when the behavioral and social sciences were trying to emulate the advances in physics and chemistry. More recently, however, there is growing opinion that our interpretations of our lives influence the decisions we make. The self we tell ourselves we are, the narrative self, appears to influence what decisions we make in life. I had the opportunity to interview a leading psychoanalyst in Los Angeles when he turned 75. I asked him about his psychoanalytic theory and how it related to individuals. He said, 'That is my theory, you have to realize that every person has a theory about his or her own life.' This seems to me a very integrative statement for my approach to autobiography; autobiography reveals the individual's theory about himself or herself, how they explain their life. It leads to the idea that one's self, the self we tell ourselves, is in a sense a personal theory, a theory that provides direction for decisions and actions in everyday life. Here lies a possible connection between the autobiographical stories of life and the decisions that individuals have made and the directions their lives have taken."
~ James E. Birren,How Do I Think I Got Here? (The LLI Review, Fall 2006)

Birren was a pioneer in life story and reminiscence groups.
Read his life story here

Stories Are About Change (Shawn Coyne, Steven Pressfield Online, 8-9-13) In his wonderful book The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves, psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz tells the story of Marissa Panigrosso, who worked on the 98th floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center. Grosz suggests that the reason every single person in the South Tower didn’t immediately leave the building is that they did not have a familiar story in their minds to guide them.

• Wonder by R. J. Palacio (for kids). August Pullman is a 10-year-old boy who likes Star Wars and Xbox, ordinary except for his jarring facial anomalies.
• Out of My Mind by Sharon Draper (for kids) Melody can't walk, talk, or do normal daily activities for herself, but she has a photographic memory and the camera is always running.
• The Running Dream by Wendelin Van Draanen (for teen and young adult readers) Jessica thinks her life is over when she loses a leg in a car accident. She's not comforted by the news that she'll be able to walk with the help of a prosthetic leg. Who cares about walking when you live to run?
• It's Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini (for mature teens). a poignant and sometimes humorous tale about navigating adolescence and depression
• El Deafo by Cece Bell (grades 2 to 6) Cece loses her hearing from spinal meningitis, and takes readers through the arduous journey of learning to lip read and decipher the noise of her hearing aid, with the goal of finding a true friend. "'It's an honest and rather sweet tale of a girl coming to terms with her disability, and as such the kind of story that will strike a chord with any child who has felt ostracised or different." ~The Busy Librarian
MORE TO COME~!

Quick Links

"Religion is a person sitting in church thinking about kayaking.
Spirituality is a person sitting in a kayak thinking about God." ~ Appalachian Memes, Facebook

Skin Deep (Snap Judgment, "Gratitude 2016"). It’s days before the big dance at Camp Discovery...and there’s a problem, a few problems. And the kids at this Discovery Camp (where all the participants have a skin disease, but at this camp feel normal, because it's a "bully-free zone") are more used to rejection than your average camper. Which is why what happens at the dance is surprisingly emotional (also for those listening). Good listening, and an interesting lesson learned.

Storytelling and ecological management: understanding kinship and complexity (Lela Brown, The Journal of Sustainability Education, Winter 2013) "Stories, art, and play likely serve a similar social function and evolutionary purpose (Boyd, 2009). The fact that people experience enjoyable feelings when listening to a story, due to the release of dopamine in the brain, suggest that our bodies have evolved an incentive for storytelling because it has helped us survive (Boyd, 2009). Just as play is the repetitive practice of a finely honed skill that people might need for a task like hunting, storytelling might be a repeating of the social information needed for subsistence....Though the message may have fallen by the wayside along with the activity of extended family gathering to retell old stories, the fate of humans and the fate of the natural world are still inseparable. It may be that simply by taking time to participate in the simple human activity of sharing narratives through oral tradition, people might be helping to create a much needed cultural evolutionary shift."

"Love, like light, is a thing that is enacted better than defined: we know it afterward by the traces it leaves on paper."
~ Adam Gopnik

Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity by Andrew Solomon. Solomon "begins by describing his own experience as the gay son of heterosexual parents, then goes on to investigate the worlds of deaf children of hearing parents, dwarves born into “normal” families, and so on. His observations and conclusions are complex and not easily summarized, with one exception: The chapter on children of law-abiding parents who become criminals. Solomon rightly points out that this is a very different situation indeed: “to be or produce a schizophrenic...is generally deemed a misfortune,” he writes. “To...produce a criminal is often deemed a failure.” Still, parents must cope with or not, accept or not, the deeds or behaviors or syndromes of their offspring. How they do or do not do that makes for fascinating and disturbing reading."~Sara Nelson

"When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape." ~ novelist Louise Erdrich

"At last, a collection that shows the "why, what, and how" behind memoir as legacy. Spanning more than a century, these intriguing reflections of personal as well as global social and political history are told in the unique voice and viewpoint of each storyteller."
~ Susan Wittig Albert, author, Writing from Life, founder, Story Circle Network

“This anthology sings with Walt Whitman’s spirit of democracy, a celebration of our diversity. Each selection is a song of self; some have perfect pitch, some the waver of authenticity. All demonstrate the power of the word to salvage from the onrush of life, nuggets worth saving.”
~ Tristine Rainer, author of Your Life as Story and Writing the New Autobiography

"Many descriptions of autism and Asperger's describe people like me as 'not wanting contact with others' or 'preferring to play alone.' I can't speak for other kids, but I'd like to be very clear about my own feelings. I did not ever want to be alone. And all those child psychologists who said 'John prefers to play by himself' were dead wrong. I played by myself because I was a failure at playing with others. I was alone as a result of my own limitations, and being alone was one of the bitterest disappointments of my young life. The sting of those early failures followed me long into adulthood, even after I learned about Asperger's."
~ John Elder Robison, in Look Me In the Eye: My Life with Asperger's, p. 211

"...illness is terrible but, with some luck, it can also be full of wonders. The terrors assault us at once; the wonders take longer to become visible. Stories help us gain some distance from the terrors and learn to perceive the wonders, but storytelling is a skill, and like all skills, it takes practice to be most effective. Stories offer witness to all that is badly wrong and needs to be changed, and stories offer imaginations of a more generous life that can be. In telling all kinds of stories, we find healing."
~ Arthur Frank, Stories and Healing

the message of fred clifton

i rise up from the dead before you
a nimbus of dark light
to say that the only mercy is memory,
to say that the only hell
is regret.

~Lucille Clifton

"This packrat has learned that what the next generation will value most is not what we owned but the evidence of who we were and the tales of how we loved. In the end, it's the family stories that are worth the storage."
~ Ellen Goodman, Boston Globe

"Time is a dressmaker specializing in alterations."
~ Faith Baldwin

"You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all you have been and done, which may take some time, you are fierce with reality."
~ Florida Scott-Maxwell

"The real family legacy is the stories, not the sterling."
~ Andrea Gross

"Time cannot vanish without trace for it is a subjective, spiritual category. The time we have lived settles in our soul as an experience placed within time. In a certain sense the past is far more real, at any rate more stable, more resilient than the present. The present slips and vanishes like sand between the fingers,acquiring material weight in its recollection."
~ Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time